An uneven minor mad scientist horror pic directed by
Terence Fisher ("The Hound of the Baskervilles"/"The
Curse of
Frankenstein"/"Kill Me Tomorrow"),that can be construed as a
lesser Eyes Without A Face (1959).It's based on the story byAlexander
Paal and Steven
Vas,and is
written byRichard
H.
Landau and Martin
Berkeley.

Workaholic, brilliant and
philanthropic plastic surgeon Dr. Philip
Ritter (Paul Henreid) goes on a forced weekend holiday
when stranded in
the English countryside and meets at the inn he's
staying at American
concert
pianist Alice Brent (Lizabeth
Scott), who is on a European tour. In the few days
that they are
together they fall in love, but she refuses his marriage
proposal and
vanishes. The smug doctor's ego is bruised, so on the
rebound he gives
career female criminal Lily
Conover (Mary
Mackenzie), an
inmate in the local
prison soon to be paroled, a face lift and makes her
look just like
Alice. Doc then marries her, as he thinks with her new
face and
environment she'll change into a refined lady. But the
marriage is a
disaster, as Lily turns into a monster and to the
chagrin of hubby goes
on a stealing spree, parties with her low-life
criminal friends in the
cultured doctor's house and treats the well-meaning
but foolish doctor
with utter contempt.

Alice
was supposed to marry her kind-hearted British
manager, David (Andre Morell), but he refuses when he sees that she's
in love with doc. If things were far-fetched until
now, when Alice
returns to Philip and the psychopathic Lily won't give
him a divorce
things really go over-the-top in the film's
unbelievable ending that
one can only scratch their head at and wonder what the
writers were
thinking.

Liz
Scott is in a dual role, playing the nice cultured
concert pianist and
the boorish criminal after surgery.

The
chintzy Hammer studio leaves us with the moral lesson
that one can
never steal a face, even if it's beautiful, and expect
it to therefore
be beautiful without working on the character part. Hitchcock's Vertigo (1958)
cleared up all
of this film's flaws in storytelling, while using the
same motifs. Paul
Henreid starred in the also
far-fetched crime drama entitled The Scar (aka:
Hollow Triumph, 1948), where fugitive Henreid
kills his
psychoanalyst double and takes his place--which
reminded me of this
pic's hysterical (and I don't mean funny) story.